Building A Partscaster (Telecaster) Part 7 - Finishing Off

Introduction

With the wiring mostly done, the last stage was to add my chosen pickups, get the control plate mounted and fasten down the scratch guard. These should have been easy tasks, but that non-standard body was continuing to threw spanners in the works.

The control plate was overlapping one of the pickguard screws.

The Route to Success

After some thought, I took the decision to alter the body, as it's already been modified and repaired at the bridge routing. The control cavity would have to be widened on one side, but not having many woodwork tools, I wondered how best to do this. (chisel, Dremel with circular blade, drill loads of holes?)

I was sure most of the methods I had available to me would look terrible, so I ordered a cheap mini-router from eBay and a selection of router bits.

My new Katsu mini router

This isn't a review of the router, although I will say after a little practise on some scrap wood I was very happy with the results. I measured the gap from the edge of the router to where the cut was made and this gave me my offset.

Next I clamped a wooden guide onto the guitar body using this offset and a line I'd made on some masking tape to mark the new cavity edge. All I needed to do now was set the router depth, hold my breath and start cutting.

The body ready for routing

I had to do two cuts at different depths because the cutting tool wasn't deep enough, but this reduced load on the router and gave me more control. I took my time, being careful to avoid burn marks and to freehand the curved ends.

The completed routing (the black line marks the edge of the plate).

I also cleaned up where the cavity had been chiseled out to give the switch more space. There's not a lot of wood depth here, so I removed very little. I had to unsolder and pull the ground wires back before I started, and here you can see I've re-attached one of them.

The pick guard stills needs modification.

With the control cavity done, attention turned to the pick guard. The extended cavity now lines up better with the pick guard cutout, but it still needs modifying a little. I drew round the control plate with a marker pen and then used a rotatory file on my electric drill to rough it out.

The pick guard modification completed.

I finished off with a fine half-round file and re-checked that everything fitted well. The screw holes were then marked and drilled with a 2mm bit.

The copper shielding in place. (notice twisted pickup wires to reduce hum)

The body had been shielded with copper tape, so before finishing the electrical work, I replaced this with gardeners anti-slug copper tape. This stuff is quite cheap, I just cut off the serrated edges or trimmed down as required. I then applied a little plumbers flux to the stuck down edges and soldered all the pieces together. (They need to form one continuous cover)

The pickup mounting springs were replaced with neoprene tubing, and I found that a little bit of lubrication helped them fit over the pickup mounting bolts. It's a common modification that removes microphonic pickup noise, but I figured it was better to do it now. Then it was onto the socket.

Modern screw fitted output jack.

I'd read that you need a special tool to fit telecaster socket mounts, and while I liked the idea of being authentic, it sounded like a load of hassle. Most people seemed to be removing them and fitting these screw mounted sockets that don't go loose or wobbly. So that's another upgrade pre-fitted.

The final step was to solder the pickups and output jack onto the pre-wired control plate and ensure all ground connections were made properly. Screwing things back together before testing is tempting fate, so I plugged it into my THR5 amp and checked the wiring before buttoning it all up. To my surprise everything worked, those Seymour Duncan wiring diagrams were spot on.

The completed guitar body.

And here is the finished guitar, ready to be set up and played. Initial tests revealed a very trebly sound which was easily tamed by backing off the tone control. The series switch mode (in position four) had bags of volume and then the phase switch on the tone-pull really thins-out the sound.

I like it.